CULTURE STOPS

Clowning it up at the Warhol

August 31, 2003|By Michael Kilian, Special to the Tribune.

They've sent in the clowns.

Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum this week opened "Clown Paintings: From the Collection of Diane Keaton and Others," an exhibition of some of the happiest--and saddest--portrait faces ever to grace a museum wall.

Actress Keaton has had a mania for collecting kitsch of all kinds for years, with a particular zest for clowns. Noted gallery owner and collector Robert Berman, who shares this obsession, said he began running into sellers of clown paintings who told him: "If you don't buy it, Diane Keaton will." Eventually, Berman and Keaton joined forces and merged their clown collections for a show at his Santa Monica, Calif., gallery.

The more than 40 clown works in the Warhol Museum show include some of the best paintings owned by both of them. The exhibition, on view through Oct. 26, was chosen as part of the museum's "Summer of Andy"--celebrating what would have been the cult artist's 75th birthday. He, too, was an obsessive collector. He amassed a horde of 300 cookie jars, and bought large plastic Walt Disney figures by the dozen. The latter were sold after his death for thousands of dollars as part of "the Andy Warhol Collection."

Also on view, through Oct. 5, is "The American Supermarket," the re-creation of the famous 1964 Pop Art installation created by Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and other artists that evokes a 1960s era supermarket through the juxtaposition of real supermarket goods with Warhol's and others' iconic renderings of them.

On view now through Nov. 15 at New York State's Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, N.Y., are sculptures by Chakaia Booker and Peter Lundberg. Booker's run to large-scale works made from discarded truck, car and bicycle tires. Lundberg works with stainless steel, and goes for twisted and folded forms of monumental outdoor structure.

The art center is on Old Pleasant Hill Road; telephone 845-534-3115; www.skac.org.